HackMag

According to cvedetails.com, more than 1,305 vulnerabilities have been found in the Linux core since 1999. Sixty-eight of these were in 2015. Most of them don't cause many problems (they are marked as Local and Low), and some may cause problems only if they are attached to certain applications or OS settings. In reality these numbers are not that big, but the core is not the entire OS. There are also vulnerabilities found in GNU Coreutils, Binutils, glibs and, of course, user applications. Let's take a look at the most interesting of the bunch.

As everybody knows, Android has the foundation of the Linux kernel. This implies that in theory you can run on a smartphone all the applications that are available on desktop Linux. In practice, everything is more difficult. Since the set of Native libraries in Android differs from that on the desktop (not to speak of the platform architecture), the applications need to be compiled statically. And sometimes to be patched, as well. But in this case too, the application operation is not always guaranteed.

The aspect of backup saving (and storage) is, certainly, one of the most important in the world of information: why would anyone want to lose his/her data as a result of the error (whether software or hardware error)? Since, there is a wide array of backup tools. I list the most necessary requirements, in my view, to these tools:

Ease of automation and the very existence of such. However, this requirement is almost completely balanced by the presence of Cron in all the general purpose *nix distributives. Still, backing up is just the very case when you should not put all your eggs in one basket.

Supported media and network backups. A backup tool can be arbitrarily remarkable, but if it supports only a limited set of media available for storing backups, then it is not worth a button. Creation of backups via network (including cloud) storages stands alone. Here appears the aspect of encryption and transmission of data and of backups themselves.

Ease of recovery. I suppose, comments are needless here, because if the loss of data has occurred, its recovery should be as quick and painless as possible.

Ease of initial configuration. This requirement is, of course, debatable since backup creation is configured only once. However, people often make a choice in favor of far less functional tools only because of their simplicity.

I did not make it a point to describe in details this or that tool — it is possible to write a separate book or at least an article almost about each of them. Here is just a brief overview of them.

Relatively recently, we saw the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, a distribution that is rightly considered to be the number one in the corporate sector. Without waiting for its clones, we decided to look at what is new in this giant of open source world which was able, at some point, to combine the seemingly incompatible – making money and using an open-source model.

OpenStack is a very fashionable word in today’s IT media space. Virtually everyone heard about it, but not so many have seen it in action. Moreover, only a few dared to taste it in a “serious way”. In our company, we took this risk and, today, I’ll tell you what happened to us and why the fashion often runs ahead of prudence and stability.